Biology, Technology, and Music

I've written before about artificial life researchers from the 18th and 20th centuries working to create robots that attempt to recreate the human voice. I recently saw this terrifying video over at the PopSci blog of a recent robotic voice machine and wanted to share it:

Over at Noise For Airports, Nick shares a very different way to combine biology, computer science, and music--The Heart Chamber Orchestra, which plays music generated from the rhythm of their combined heartbeats in real time:

Friday Not-So-Random Five
I decided in honor of the new year, I'd do something a bit different this week. Instead of
doing a random shuffle on my IPod, I separated out my favorites of the modern classical pieces that I discovered this year. Some of these are brand new recordings just released this…

As you know, Bill Nye has agreed to engage in a debate about evolution with Ken Ham at the Kentucky Creation Museum. You may also know that I suggested that this debate was a bad idea, not so much because it is Bill Nye doing it (he’s a great spokesperson for science and science education) but…

This went around a different corner of my social-media universe while I was off in Waterloo, away from my iTunes. I was curious about it, though, so looked at the contents of the "25 Most Played" playlist, and having done that, I might as well post them here (the number in parentheses is the number…

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Oscillator is moving to the brand new Scientific American network! I'm excited for this new opportunity and sad to be leaving my old home here. I want to give many special thanks to SEED people past and present for their help and support, in particular Nikki, Erin, Greg, Evan, and Wes. And of…

I got a long email from one of the authors of the skull measuring study and I want to make some clarifications to my previous post. It seems that I was not as clear and thorough as I could have been in my argument.
First, my sincere apologies to all physical anthropologists and other researchers…

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Last month I wrote about my friend Devin Burrill's paper about synthetic memory in yeast cells. There were a lot of really interesting questions left in the comments, and I asked Devin if she would write a guest post to answer them. She agreed and here it is, answers to your questions straight from…

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"[The black hole] teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as 'sacred,' as immutable, are anything but."
-John A. Wheeler
To an astronomer on any other world, the most important object in our Solar System wouldn't be the Earth, but rather our Sun. Just…

Vertical agitation meets shame in Fish2Fork, a new seafood conservation effort led by Charles Clover (author of End of the Line), which seeks to highlight which restaurants are best and worst when it comes to the seafood they sell. The focus on restaurants is a great move and I particularly like how Fish2Fork highlights the 'top 10' and 'bottom 10' restaurants.
As a quibble, I wish the "We say…

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.” -Carl Sagan
For thousands of years, humanity has looked up at the night sky and wondered at what might be out there. For the first time in all of our history, we not only have the answers to what's present in the Universe, we not only know the nature of most objects we see (and infer), but we even have…